Coco Fusco And Guillermo Discover: A Couple In A Cage

Intrigued by what it meant to embody an “Other” in the context of the quincentenary of the events that took place in 1492 and led by an honest curiosity of whether racial dynamics had evolved throughout those 500 years, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña put together “A Couple in a Cage.” The performance depicted them as undiscovered Amerindians from an island in the Gulf of Mexico and made its way throughout the United States and countries such as Spain and England. The experiences of the performers and the response of the public are laid out in “The Other History of Cultural Performance” by Fusco herself. The performance was conceived by Coco and Guillermo as a “reverse ethnography” which sought to explore how the notion of the “other” manifests itself in “modern society”. It also sought to examine the limits of multiculturalism and connect present-day museum and anthropological practices that have given “credence …show more content…
This is important in that it provides the reader with ample historical and literary context that can deepen the understanding of the performance itself and of the place from which it emerged. Fusco’s articulation of the cage as a “blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we are” (152) sets up the textual stage for the audience’s responses, which ultimately “indicate that colonialist roles have been internalized quite effectively” (153). In this way, the essay serves as the performers’ account on the performance—how it came to be, what was the logic behind it—but also as a way to return to those initial motifs and questions, and formulating clear answers based on the responses to the performance, thus illuminating the “reverse ethnography” aspect of its